New graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are entering a workforce in dispute.

While I and my other first-year colleagues look forward to teaching work, we also have to take on a specific challenge: balancing our life as postgraduates with our position as staff. Graduate teaching assistants must carefully manage two roles, navigating situations from attending staff meetings to running into their students in the university bar.

For GTAs who are also union members, the task is even more complicated. As well as balancing their research workloads, frequently precarious financial circumstances and their own teacher training, these GTAs must decide where they stand on union matters.

This latest action and its implications for essays, exams and, possibly, students' graduations puts teaching staff in a difficult position. GTAs face a specific set of complexities which reinforce their dual status: those who have supervisors in the union may find their own work unread, while those who are also UCU members are obliged to boycott what is possibly their first set of marking.

The steady progress of a doctoral programme can undoubtedly weather the boycott better than a finalist's exam scripts, but managing new deadlines around strike action provides yet another administrative challenge to graduate students. Even those of us who support our more senior colleagues face concerns about our future employment.

In my own department, postgraduates range from fierce supporters of the UCU – with the escalating pay struggle in some cases inspiring greater participation in the union – to GTAs who have stated that they would, if asked, work for free.

To cross or not to cross?

While it's always discouraging to have a peer cross the picket line you're standing on, it's hard to fault those who are reluctant to protest. Aside from enjoyment of the work itself and a genuine belief in the importance of undergraduate learning, graduate students are aware that it is nearly impossible to land that crucial first job without a stint in the seminar room on their CV. The majority of us feel lucky to teach, and few of those aiming to enter academia feel able to oppose management.

Our short-term gain does not necessarily equate to long-term success, however. As a recent Academics Anonymous article noted, the financial pressure placed on GTAs risks making academia even more exclusionary than it already is. The success or failure of the UCU campaign stands to have a decisive impact on the future careers of today's graduate students – and, it follows, undergraduates. The current outlook is not encouraging: the 2% offer still represents a loss in real terms, and as institutions threaten to withhold 100% of pay from academics who participate in the boycott it is clear that any further concessions will not come easily.

The risk now is that continued cuts in pay will have an impact on who chooses to study for a PhD and who joins the profession.

GTAs are, as a group, drawn from a fairly narrow demographic, and financial hardship is likely to make them even less representative of wider society. This leads eventually to students being taught by an underpaid and less diverse workforce. By refusing to support the marking boycott, GTAs may find they are tacitly supporting their own future wage cut, with long-term consequences for the students they are teaching.